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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the company. For the search engine provided by the company, see Google
Search. For the parent company with the stock tickers GOOG and GOOGL, see Alphabet
Inc. For the number, see Googol. For other uses, see Google (disambiguation).

Google LLC

The Google logo used since 2015

Google's headquarters, the Googleplex

Formerly Google Inc. (1998–2017)

Company type Subsidiary

Traded as NASDAQ: GOOGL, GOOG

Internet
Industry
Cloud computing
Computer software
Computer hardware
Artificial intelligence
Advertising

Founded September 4, 1998; 26 years

ago[a] in Menlo Park, California, United
States

Founders Larry Page

Sergey Brin

Headquarters Googleplex,

Mountain View, California

U.S.

Area served Worldwide

Key people Sundar Pichai (CEO)

Ruth Porat (President and CIO)
Anat Ashkenazi (CFO)
Thomas Kurian (CEO of Google Cloud)

Products Android
Nest
Pixel
Search
Workspace
Fitbit
Waze
YouTube
 Full list
Number of 182,502 (2023)
employees

Parent Alphabet Inc.

Subsidiaries Adscape
Cameyo
Charleston Road Registry
DeepMind
Endoxon
FeedBurner
ImageAmerica
Kaltix
Nest Labs
reCAPTCHA
YouTube
ZipDash

ASN 15169

Website [Link]

Footnotes / references
[5][6][7][8]

Then Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt (left) with co-

founders Sergey Brin (center) and Larry Page (right) in 2008

Google LLC (/ˈɡuːɡəl/ ⓘ, GOO-gəl) is an American multinational

corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search
engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-
commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial intelligence (AI).[9] It has been referred to
as "the most powerful company in the world" by the BBC[10] and is one of the
world's most valuable brands due to its market dominance, data collection, and
technological advantages in the field of AI.[11][12]
[13]
Alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Google's parent company, Alphabet
Inc. is one of the five Big Tech companies.
Google was founded on September 4, 1998, by American computer scientists Larry
Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University in California.
Together, they own about 14% of its publicly listed shares and control 56% of its
stockholder voting power through super-voting stock. The company went public via
an initial public offering (IPO) in 2004. In 2015, Google was reorganized as a wholly
owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Google is Alphabet's largest subsidiary and is
a holding company for Alphabet's internet properties and interests. Sundar Pichai was
appointed CEO of Google on October 24, 2015, replacing Larry Page, who became the
CEO of Alphabet. On December 3, 2019, Pichai also became the CEO of Alphabet. [14]

The company has since rapidly grown to offer a multitude of

products and services beyond Google Search, many of which hold dominant market
positions. These products address a wide range of use cases, including email
(Gmail), navigation and mapping (Waze, Maps and Earth), cloud computing
(Cloud), web navigation (Chrome), video sharing (YouTube), productivity
(Workspace), operating systems (Android), cloud storage (Drive), language translation
(Translate), photo storage (Photos), videotelephony (Meet), smart
home (Nest), smartphones (Pixel), wearable technology (Pixel Watch and Fitbit), music
streaming (YouTube Music), video on demand (YouTube TV), AI (Google
Assistant and Gemini), machine learning APIs (TensorFlow), AI chips (TPU), and
more. Discontinued Google products include gaming (Stadia),
[15]
Glass, Google+, Reader, Play Music, Nexus, Hangouts, and Inbox by Gmail.[16]
[17]
Google's other ventures outside of internet services and consumer
electronics include quantum computing (Sycamore), self-driving cars (Waymo, formerly
the Google Self-Driving Car Project), smart cities (Sidewalk Labs), and transformer
models (Google DeepMind).[18]

Google Search and YouTube are the two most-visited websites worldwide followed
by Facebook and Twitter (now known as X). Google is also the largest search engine,
mapping and navigation application, email provider, office suite, online video
platform, photo and cloud storage provider, mobile operating system, web browser,
machine learning framework, and AI virtual assistant provider in the world as measured
by market share.[19] On the list of most valuable brands, Google is ranked second
by Forbes as of January 2022[20] and fourth by Interbrand as of February 2022.[21]

The company has received significant criticism involving issues such as privacy
concerns, tax avoidance, censorship, search neutrality, antitrust and abuse of
its monopoly position. On August 5, 2024, D.C. Circuit Court Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled
that Google held an illegal monopoly over Internet search.[22]

History
Main articles: History of Google and List of mergers and acquisitions by Alphabet
See also: Alphabet Inc.

Early years

Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2003

Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin
while they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California.[23][24][25] The project
initially involved an unofficial "third founder", Scott Hassan, the original lead
programmer who wrote much of the code for the original Google Search engine, but he
left before Google was officially founded as a company;[26][27] Hassan went on to pursue a
career in robotics and founded the company Willow Garage in 2006.[28][29]

While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the
search terms appeared on the page, they theorized about a better system that analyzed
the relationships among websites.[30] They called this algorithm PageRank; it determined
a website's relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages that
linked back to the original site.[31][32] Page told his ideas to Hassan, who began writing the
code to implement Page's ideas.[26] Page and Brin would also use their friend Susan
Wojcicki's garage as their office when the search engine was set up in 1998.[33]

Page and Brin originally nicknamed the new search engine "BackRub", because the
system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.[23][34][35] Hassan, as well as
Alan Steremberg were cited by Page and Brin as being critical to the development of
Google. Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd later co-authored with Page and Brin the
first paper about the project, describing PageRank and the initial prototype of the
Google search engine, published in 1998. Héctor García-Molina and Jeffrey
Ullman were also cited as contributors to the project.[36] PageRank was influenced by a
similar page-ranking and site-scoring algorithm earlier used for RankDex, developed
by Robin Li in 1996, with Larry Page's PageRank patent including a citation to Li's
earlier RankDex patent; Li later went on to create the Chinese search engine Baidu.[37][38]

Eventually, they changed the name to Google; the name of the search engine was a
misspelling of the word googol,[23][39][40] a very large number written 10100 (1 followed by 100
zeros), picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities
of information.[41]
 Google's original homepage had a simplistic design
because the company founders had little experience in HTML, the markup language used for
designing web pages[42]

Google was initially funded by an August 1998 investment of $100,000 from Andy
Bechtolsheim,[23] co-founder of Sun Microsystems. This initial investment served as a
motivation to incorporate the company to be able to use the funds.[43][44] Page and Brin
initially approached David Cheriton for advice because he had a nearby office in
Stanford, and they knew he had startup experience, having recently sold the company
he co-founded, Granite Systems, to Cisco for $220 million. David arranged a meeting
with Page and Brin and his Granite co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. The meeting was
set for 8 a.m. at the front porch of David's home in Palo Alto and it had to be brief
because Andy had another meeting at Cisco, where he now worked after the
acquisition, at 9 a.m. Andy briefly tested a demo of the website, liked what he saw, and
then went back to his car to grab the check. David Cheriton later also joined in with a
$250,000 investment.[45][46]

Google received money from two other angel investors in 1998: [Link]
founder Jeff Bezos, and entrepreneur Ram Shriram.[47] Page and Brin had first
approached Shriram, who was a venture capitalist, for funding and counsel, and
Shriram invested $250,000 in Google in February 1998. Shriram knew Bezos because
Amazon had acquired Junglee, at which Shriram was the president. It was Shriram who
told Bezos about Google. Bezos asked Shriram to meet Google's founders and they
met six months after Shriram had made his investment when Bezos and his wife were
on a vacation trip to the Bay Area. Google's initial funding round had already formally
closed but Bezos' status as CEO of Amazon was enough to persuade Page and Brin to
extend the round and accept his investment.[48][49]

Between these initial investors, friends, and family Google raised around $1,000,000,
which is what allowed them to open up their original shop in Menlo Park, California.
[50]
Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.[25]
[51][52]

After some additional, small investments through the end of 1998 to early 1999, [47] a new
$25 million round of funding was announced on June 7, 1999,[53] with major investors
including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital.[44] Both firms
were initially reticent about investing jointly in Google, as each wanted to retain a larger
percentage of control over the company to themselves. Larry and Sergey however
insisted on taking investments from both. Both venture companies finally agreed to
investing jointly $12.5 million each due to their belief in Google's great potential and
through the mediation of earlier angel investors Ron Conway and Ram Shriram who
had contacts in the venture companies.[54]

Growth
In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California,[55] which is home
to several prominent Silicon Valley technology start-ups.[56] The next year, Google began
selling advertisements associated with search keywords against Page and Brin's initial
opposition toward an advertising-funded search engine.[57][25] To maintain an uncluttered
page design, advertisements were solely text-based.[58] In June 2000, it was announced
that Google would become the default search engine provider for Yahoo!, one of the
most popular websites at the time, replacing Inktomi.[59][60]

Google's first production server[61]

In 2003, after outgrowing two other locations, the company leased an office complex
from Silicon Graphics, at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California.
[62]
The complex became known as the Googleplex, a play on the word googolplex, the
number one followed by a googol of zeroes. Three years later, Google bought the
property from SGI for $319 million.[63] By that time, the name "Google" had found its way
into everyday language, causing the verb "google" to be added to the Merriam-Webster
Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, denoted as: "to use the Google
search engine to obtain information on the Internet".[64][65] The first use of the verb on
television appeared in an October 2002 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.[66]

Additionally, in 2001 Google's investors felt the need to have a strong internal
management, and they agreed to hire Eric Schmidt as the chairman and CEO of
Google.[50] Eric was proposed by John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins. He had been trying to
find a CEO that Sergey and Larry would accept for several months, but they rejected
several candidates because they wanted to retain control over the company. Michael
Moritz from Sequoia Capital at one point even menaced requesting Google to
immediately pay back Sequoia's $12.5m investment if they did not fulfill their promise to
hire a chief executive officer, which had been made verbally during investment
negotiations. Eric was not initially enthusiastic about joining Google either, as the
company's full potential had not yet been widely recognized at the time, and as he was
occupied with his responsibilities at Novell where he was CEO. As part of him joining,
Eric agreed to buy $1 million of Google preferred stocks as a way to show his
commitment and to provide funds Google needed.[67]

Initial public offering

On August 19, 2004, Google became a public company via an initial public offering,
listing the company on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol
GOOG. At that time Page, Brin and Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20
years, until the year 2024.[68] The company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85
per share.[69][70] Shares were sold in an online auction format using a system built
by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal.[71][72] The sale of $1.67
billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.[73]

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011

On November 13, 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock,[74][75]
[76][77]
On July 20, 2007, Google bids $4.6 billion for the wireless-spectrum auction by the
FCC.[78] On March 11, 2008, Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, transferring to
Google valuable relationships that DoubleClick had with Web publishers and advertising
agencies.[79][80] By 2011, Google was handling approximately 3 billion searches per day.
To handle this workload, Google built 11 data centers around the world with several
thousand servers in each. These data centers allowed Google to handle the ever-
changing workload more efficiently.[50]

In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one billion for
the first time.[81][82] In May 2012, Google acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, in its
largest acquisition to date.[83][84][85] This purchase was made in part to help Google gain
Motorola's considerable patent portfolio on mobile phones and wireless technologies, to
help protect Google in its ongoing patent disputes with other companies,
[86]
mainly Apple and Microsoft,[87] and to allow it to continue to freely offer Android.[88]

2012 onwards
In June 2013, Google acquired Waze for $966 million.[89] While Waze would remain an
independent entity, its social features, such as its crowdsourced location platform, were
reportedly valuable integrations between Waze and Google Maps, Google's own
mapping service.[90] Google announced the launch of a new company, called Calico, on
September 19, 2013, to be led by Apple Inc. chairman Arthur Levinson. In the official
public statement, Page explained that the "health and well-being" company would focus
on "the challenge of ageing and associated diseases".[91]

Entrance of building where Google and its subsidiary Deep Mind are
located at 6 Pancras Square, London

On January 26, 2014, Google announced it had agreed to acquire DeepMind

Technologies, a privately held artificial intelligence company from London.[92] Technology
news website Recode reported that the company was purchased for $400 million, yet
the source of the information was not disclosed. A Google spokesperson declined to
comment on the price.[93][94] The purchase of DeepMind aids in Google's recent growth in
the artificial intelligence and robotics community.[95] In 2015,
DeepMind's AlphaGo became the first computer program to defeat a top human pro at
the game of Go.

According to Interbrand's annual Best Global Brands report, Google has been the
second most valuable brand in the world (behind Apple Inc.) in 2013,[96] 2014,[97] 2015,
[98]
and 2016, with a valuation of $133 billion.[99]

On August 10, 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as
a conglomerate named Alphabet Inc. Google became Alphabet's largest subsidiary and
the umbrella company for Alphabet's Internet interests. Upon completion of the
restructuring, Sundar Pichai became CEO of Google, replacing Larry Page, who
became CEO of Alphabet.[100][101][102]

Current CEO, Sundar Pichai, with Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi

On August 8, 2017, Google fired employee James Damore after he distributed a memo
throughout the company that argued bias and "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber"
clouded their thinking about diversity and inclusion, and that it is also biological factors,
not discrimination alone, that cause the average woman to be less interested than men
in technical positions.[103] Google CEO Sundar Pichai accused Damore of violating
company policy by "advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace", and he
was fired on the same day.[104][105][106]

Between 2018 and 2019, tensions between the company's leadership and its workers
escalated as staff protested company decisions on internal sexual
harassment, Dragonfly, a censored Chinese search engine, and Project Maven, a
military drone artificial intelligence, which had been seen as areas of revenue growth for
the company.[107][108] On October 25, 2018, The New York Times published the exposé,
"How Google Protected Andy Rubin, the 'Father of Android'". The company
subsequently announced that "48 employees have been fired over the last two years"
for sexual misconduct.[109] On November 1, 2018, more than 20,000 Google employees
and contractors staged a global walk-out to protest the company's handling of sexual
harassment complaints.[110][111] CEO Sundar Pichai was reported to be in support of the
protests.[112] Later in 2019, some workers accused the company of retaliating against
internal activists.[108]

On March 19, 2019, Google announced that it would enter the video game market,
launching a cloud gaming platform called Google Stadia.[113]

On June 3, 2019, the United States Department of Justice reported that it would
investigate Google for antitrust violations.[114] This led to the filing of an antitrust lawsuit in
October 2020, on the grounds the company had abused a monopoly position in
the search and search advertising markets.[115]

In December 2019, former PayPal chief operating officer Bill Ready became Google's
new commerce chief. Ready's role will not be directly involved with Google Pay.[116]

In April 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Google announced several cost-cutting
measures. Such measures included slowing down hiring for the remainder of 2020,
except for a small number of strategic areas, recalibrating the focus and pace of
investments in areas like data centers and machines, and non-business essential
marketing and travel.[117] Most employees were also working from home due to
the COVID-19 pandemic and the success of it even led to Google announcing that they
would be permanently converting some of their jobs to work from home [118]

The 2020 Google services outages disrupted Google services: one in August that
affected Google Drive among others, another in November affecting YouTube, and a
third in December affecting the entire suite of Google applications. All three outages
were resolved within hours.[119][120][121]

In 2021, the Alphabet Workers Union was founded, composed mostly of Google
employees.[122]

In January 2021, the Australian Government proposed legislation that would require
Google and Facebook to pay media companies for the right to use their content. In
response, Google threatened to close off access to its search engine in Australia.[123]
In March 2021, Google reportedly paid $20 million for Ubisoft ports on Google Stadia.
[124]
Google spent "tens of millions of dollars" on getting major publishers such
as Ubisoft and Take-Two to bring some of their biggest games to Stadia.[125]

In April 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google ran a years-long program
called "Project Bernanke" that used data from past advertising bids to gain an
advantage over competing for ad services. This was revealed in documents concerning
the antitrust lawsuit filed by ten US states against Google in December. [126]

In September 2021, the Australian government announced plans to curb Google's

capability to sell targeted ads, claiming that the company has a monopoly on the market
harming publishers, advertisers, and consumers.[127]

In 2022, Google began accepting requests for the removal of phone numbers, physical
addresses and email addresses from its search results. It had previously accepted
requests for removing confidential data only, such as Social Security numbers, bank
account and credit card numbers, personal signatures, and medical records. Even with
the new policy, Google may remove information from only certain but not all search
queries. It would not remove content that is "broadly useful", such as news articles, or
already part of the public record.[128]

In May 2022, Google announced that the company had acquired California based,
MicroLED display technology development and manufacturing Start-up Raxium. Raxium
is set to join Google's Devices and Services team to aid in the development of micro-
optics, monolithic integration, and system integration.[129][130]

In December 2022, Google debuted OSV-Scanner,[131][132] a Go tool for finding security

holes in open source software, which pulls from the largest open source vulnerability
database of its kind to defend against supply chain attacks.

In early 2023, following the success of ChatGPT and concerns that Google was falling
behind in the AI race, Google's senior management issued a "code red" and a "directive
that all of its most important products—those with more than a billion users—must
incorporate generative AI within months".[133]

In early May 2023, Google announced its plans to build two additional